Mindfulness and Eating
Conscious Eating: Re-evaluating our responses to food
The context of food in our lives
As the festive season culminates in the onset of the New Year, we might invariably find ourselves
ritualizing these transitions and celebrations with food and wine. Food is a necessity for our life and
eating is a quintessentially primal activity whose roots lie deep in our evolutionary past. The
ingestion and digestion of food is a nonnegotiable activity that is intimately weaved into the very
rhythms of our daily lives and is an important arena of gratification where we relate and bond with
others.
Food has been articulated as a life giving force in numerous traditions, from Ayurveda, Chinese
Medicine to coeval nutritional science. Moreover, a significant number of the worldâ€™s cultures and
religions have sacaralised the act of mindfulness and eating disorders. From a biological perspective,
our bodies need the right type of food to function properly as diseases and compromised health
conditions have been scientifically linked with malnutrition. Furthermore, individuals suffering from
diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, neuro-endocrinological disorders, digestive issues,
cancer, kidney and liver disease all need regulated diets. In such circumstances, paying attention to
the act of eating invariably starts taking on more importance than simply filling oneâ€™s stomach with
tasty bites and is central to our health and well being.
Hunger: the drive to eat
Getting to know our subjective sense of hunger then becomes an important part in consciously
eating. Understanding how we eat, when we eat and why we eat is necessary to correct our
unstable relationship to food. Conventionally, Eating Disorders Treatment, hunger is understood as a
physiological drive, which underscores an organic void or depletion within us signaled by a fall in
blood sugar or a rumble in the stomach, indicating that the body is in need of nutrition. Yet, in a
deeper sense hunger is an existential state that drives one consciously and unconsciously to want to
eat food and functions on multiple levels from biological to emotional to spiritual.
Today, satisfying the polysemic phenomenon of hunger, Anger Management Counseling, in urban
metropolitan areas has become increasingly easier due to the 24/7 accessibility we have to food.
Over appreciating the value of the instant gratification good food provides us, our post-modern
psyche has imbued food with a relevance that goes beyond physiological survival, making i t food a
principle source of pleasure and comfort We eat sugary, fatty, fried and salty foods not to fill our
stomachs only but to help us deal with stress and assuage other disturbing emotions such as
depression, loneliness, boredom, anxiety and anger.
Mindless Munching
The experience of stress and the need to de-stress is subliminally played out endlessly in multiple
distress- gratifications cycles that seek to balance out an over-activated nervous system, but
invariably ends up distorting the natural hunger of the body to a mechanical, unconscious and
insatiable deprivation that hijacks the physical response to food. On a more rudimentary level, we
â€œfeel badâ€ so we eat food to â€œfeel good.â€
Eating, as the pursuit of comfort, in a fast paced, hyper stimulated and highly pressured epoch,
becomes a coping mechanism to face the numerous demands made on us on a daily basis.
Behaviorally this is more common than not. Have you every sat in front the TV or in the cinema with
a tub of popcorn or some other snack and have ploughed through the whole thing in the course of
the film? Or been at a cocktail party sipping a drink and chatting with a friend while devouring bowls
of nuts and chips? Or polished off a whole bar of chocolate while sitting front of your computer
screen trying to make our work deadlines? In such instances we are not realizing how fast or how
much we are eating. This is called mindless munching or the act of grinding down edibles with a
mind contemplating everything but the food one is eating.
Conscious Eating
An antidote to this would be to mindfully observe and understand our experience of hunger and by
that token our relationship to food. By being â€œmindful,â€ one pays nonjudgmental attention to the
moments when and why one wants to eat, the food one eats and the act of oneâ€™s eating. By being
focused on how we feed ourselves we can aid a more sophisticated self awareness of ourselves and
our subliminal desires and drives that motivate us to eat as well enable a balanced relationship to
food and body size. The reasons why we over eat, starve, grow fat, become skinny or on a more
severe note become anorexic, bulimic or obese have a lot to do with how we are psycho-emotionally
processing our sense of self and the stresses we encounter. Hence it is very imperative to pay
attention to the emotional states behind oneâ€™s eating habits and working with them if they are
disturbed.
For those of us seeking meaningful and healthy ways of being-in-the-world, our relationship to food,
(equivalently) along with other quotients of well being, such as spiritual practice, psychological
growth, exercise, time spent in nature, nurturing relationships, and aesthetic appreciation, to name
a few, is of paramount importance. Below are some guidelines to help restore us to consciously
eating:
1) Before eating do a baseline self- check on your hunger level before eating. Ask yourself where
do you feel the hunger? How hungry are you?
2) Involve all your senses when you eat i.e. really see, smell, taste and feel the food you are eating
3) Serve yourself moderate helpings of food
4) Really chew your food and break it down
5) Eat in a slow fashion to prevent over eating
6) Donâ€™t skip meals
7) Avoid all distractions when you are eating
8) Eat an organic plant based diet as much as possible for yours and the planetâ€™s health
9) Therapeutically work with yourself or with a mental health professional to reduce your stress,
depression, anxiety, anger and boredom levels
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About sonerajhaveri

Sonera Jhaveri, M.Sc., M.A., Ph.D is an Integral Psyche-Therapist, trained in San Francisco, California. Her interest in human subjectivity developed at the Unviersity of London where she completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Social and Medical Anthropology. Thereafter, Sonera completed her masters degree in Integral Counseling Psychology and her doctorate in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation was on “Unconscious Ecological Alienation and its impact on the Psyche Soma” and was conducted from 2011-2012 in Mumbai, India.

Sonera’s trajectory has embodied a progression from Medical Anthropology and the Anthropology of Consciousness to include Psychodynamic, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Existential and Transpersonal psychologies. Through her research, Sonera has found that an integration of the inner world of dreams, emotions, memories, fantasies and traumas with the outer crusts of life such as the environment, career, relationships, institutions, politics, art and culture one is informed by, is of paramount significance in terms of understanding the complexity of the human condition.

Sonera specializes in individual, family, couples and group therapy. She has also been trained in organizational psychology, and has done extensive work with institutions and corporations. Sonera also conducts Skype therapy sessions, when needed. It is important to her that her clients are active participants in the co-created therapeutic process.

She has and continues to work with generalized anxiety disorders, depression and mood disorders, anger management, stress reduction, issues of low self-esteem, eating disorders, marital discord, chemical dependency and addictions. She also works within the ambit of health psychology and does therapeutic work with individuals enduring cancer, auto-immune diseases, terminal illnesses, diabetes, hypertension, kidney dysfunction, post natal depression and infertility.